16 November 2011 6:03 PM

Wasting food is a sin

In these straightened times, each household now wastes £680 worth of perfectly good, edible food every year, chucked away, dumped in the bin.

As Norman Tebbit said to me more than a year ago when similarly shameful figures were released: ‘Wasting food is a sin.’

He’s right. It is. And until recently I have been as complicit as the next person. But for the past year I have been trying to ignore the ‘sell by’, ‘use by’ and ‘best by’ labels on the food I have bought and do not the Norman but the 'Norma Test’.

Norma is my 83-year-old mother. Almost Christlike, she can turn a loaf of bread and a pound of mince and leftovers in the fridge into a meal for 12 or 20.

She smells the food and sees whether it’s ok to eat. Forget the labels, she knows what rotten food looks like and ignores the PC food police. That’s what I do now.

And yet the figures released yesterday – that as a country we bin £12billion a year of perfectly edible food - did make me wonder how we got to this point.

Partly it’s down to our parents (you can always blame them) and what my folks call ‘Depressionitis’. Children of the Second World War, they understood what rationing was. Not that they had much more to eat before the Depression or the Second World War.

My dad’s first job, aged 14, was to stand guard at the back of an open grocery truck his father drove delivering food in the tiny timber town of Yarloop, pushing people off who tried to steal food other people had paid for. Food was precious then. Wasting it was as much of a sin as stealing it.

My grandparents knew the value of a square meal on the family table. They stocked up on essentials and shopped sparingly for fresh food when they could afford them. That’s at a time when there wasn’t a Tesco’s open day and night for them to pop into.

We are the next generation of that folk, faced with a myriad of choices, endless celebrity chefs telling us what we should feed our families. We’re too busy to plan and prepare, too proud to scrimp and save.

For a couple of decades we were flush with food and money to buy it, any time of day and night. We saw prolificacy as our privilege, abundancy our right. That’s all over.

Yet now, with our take home salaries shrivelling faster than a ripe avocado, we are still shopping and dumping vast quantities of perfectly decent food our parents would have called feast.

It is unforgivable that a family complains they can’t heat their homes due to the rocketing prices of fuel, yet dump the equivalent value in food every year.

We’ve had our salad days of plenty – these are our mincing days – spag bol, chilli con carne, shepherd’s pie or that old Platell standby Slub (whatever’s left over turned into a delicious stew).

Recipes for leftovers to extend the Platell’s tantalising but rather limited retinue gratefully received.

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